Read Online The Journeying Boy by Michael Innes - Free Book Online Page A

monstrous façade sprawled a vast plywood lady. If erect, she would be perhaps fifty feet high; she was reclining, however, in an attitude of sultry abandon amid equatorial vegetation and in a garment the only prominent feature of which was a disordered shoulder-strap. As a background to the broadly accentuated charms of her person – pleasantly framed, indeed, between her six-foot, skyward-pointing breasts – was what appeared to be a two-ocean navy in process of sinking through tropical waters like a stone. One limp hand held a smoking revolver seemingly responsible for this extensive catastrophe. The other, supporting her head, was concealed in a spouting ectoplasm of flaxen hair. Her expression was languorous, provocative, and irradiated by a sort of sanctified lecherousness highly creditable to both the craft and the ardent soul of the unknown painter who had created her. Poised in air, and in curves boldly made to follow the line of her swelling hips, were the words AMOROUS, ARROGANT, ARMED! Above this, in letters ten feet high, was the title PLUTONIUM BLONDE. And higher still, and in rubric scarcely less gigantic, was the simple announcement: ART’S SUPREME ACHIEVEMENT TO DATE.
    There were queues all round the cinema. The crowd could afford to be patient. Here, as at Eve’s first party in the Garden, there was no fear lest supper cool; within this monstrous temple of unreason the celluloid feast perpetually renewed itself. And aloft in her other Paradise that second Eve, a prodigal confusion of tropical flesh and nordic tresses, spread wide the snare of her loosened zone and grotesquely elongated limbs. She was like a vast mechanized idol sucking in to her own uses these slowly moving conveyor-belts of humanity… And the crowds were growing as Cadover watched. People were buying the evening paper, reading the stop press and lining up. For here was sensation within sensation. Art’s supreme achievement to date. Scotland Yard suspects foul play .
    Another squalid crime… Circumstances had made Inspector Cadover a philosopher, and because he was a philosopher he was now depressed. This was the celebrated atom film. This was the manner in which his species chose to take its new command of natural law. Fifty thousand people had died at Hiroshima, and at Bikini ironclads had been tossed in challenge to those other disintegrating nuclei of the sun. The blood-red tide was loosed. And here it was turned to hog’s wash at five shillings the trough, and entertainment tax extra. That some wretched Londoner had met a violent death while taking his fill semed a very unimportant circumstance. To track down the murderer – if murderer there was – appeared a revoltingly useless task. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world – so what the hell did it matter? Better step into a telephone-box and call the Yard. Then he could send in his resignation in the morning and join some crank movement demanding international sovereignty…
    Inspector Cadover’s feet carried him automatically forward – as automatically as if he had been on his beat nearly forty years before. He was skirting the long queue for the cheaper seats. There was a woman clutching the hand of a fretful five-year-old boy with a chocolate-smeared mouth and sleep-heavy eyes. There were two lovers already beginning to cuddle in the crush. There was an apostate intellectual, furtive and embarrassed, caught by that scanty cincture overhead like a fly on a flypaper. Cadover went grimly forward and the vast building received him. Underfoot the padded carpet was heavy as desert sand.
    Three constables stood in the foyer. They could be no manner of use there; the management had doubtless wangled their presence as a little extra advertisement for its latest, and unforeseen, sensation. Cadover was about to scowl when he remembered that this would dismay them, and that they were only doing what they were told. So he nodded briskly and passed on. A slinky young man had